Washington New Dealer

(Seattle: 1938-1942)

Report by
Joshua Stecker

The
1930s were a turbulent time in Washington State and around the nation.
The United States was slowly emerging from the Great Depression, due in
part to the aggressive relief programs and legislative reforms proposed
by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, collectively referred to as the
"New Deal." Many Americans rallied around these ideas and organized to
show their support. In Washington State, the reform-minded public found
its voice in a left-wing weekly newspaper, the Washington New Dealer.

The
Washington New Dealer was the fifth in a series of weekly newspapers sponsored by the Washington Commonwealth
Federation (WCF) and the Washington Pension Union (WPU). The WCF was a
politically active organization that functioned as a left-wing caucus
within the state Democratic Party from 1934 through the end of the 1940s. Its members came from a variety of
social reform groups – liberals, trade unionists, grange members, and
Communists. The WCF initially tried to exclude Communist Party members,
but it eventually capitulated in order to form a united front of
left-wing reform groups. The Communist Party, in turn, effectively used
the WCF to place its members in political office, including sending WCF
President Hugh DeLacy to the US House of Representatives for two terms
beginning in 1945. In the end, however, the WCF was not able to survive
the post-war anti-communist sympathies of the nation.[1]

The WPU
was born out of the WCF and the 1935 Social Security Act as an
organization that championed the rights of senior citizens. The WPU
outlasted the WCF and was instrumental in liberalizing Washington
State's pension program in the 1940s. A good deal of the WPU's success
can be attributed to its ability to function as a union, drawing support
and power from both organized labor and the Democratic Party.[2]

Washington Commonwealth Federation newspapers
went through six name changes:

In its
early issues, the paper was intently focused on electoral politics, and
specifically on making Washington a model New Deal state. The September
1938 primary election garnered most of the paper's attention as New
Dealers celebrated sweeping victories in the state Democratic Party.[3]

On a national level, the Democratic Party remained divided on the issue
of Roosevelt's New Deal. The debate was the highlight of the Democratic
National Convention and was well documented inthe New Dealer.

The
paper also found a political punching bag in conservative Democratic
Governor Clarence D. Martin. The New Dealer attacked Martin for
using the old age pension lists to send out mailers promising bigger
pensions if he were elected – promises that were soon forgotten.[4]

The paper also led the charge in hounding Martin into open hearings on
the State's social security fund. It helped organize a 5,000 man march
on Olympia demanding that Republicans and "unworthy" Democrats stop
trying to reform and restrict the State's pension program.[5]

New
Dealer columnists
were not above name-calling either. Writer, radio personality, and
Executive Secretary of the Washington Commonwealth Federation Howard G.
Costigan referred to Governor Martin as "the State's Biggest Crackpot"
and called for a “Martin vs. the People” showdown.[6]

After Martin's Social Security reform bill passed, "setting Social
Security in Washington State back ten years," the New Dealer
wondered: "When Do the People Eat Governor?"[7]
Martin's reforms took a toll on the citizens of Washington State. Social
Security Director Charles Ernst declared that all persons physically
capable of working would have their benefits cancelled beginning April
1, 1939. This announcement was just in time for the paper to lead an
organizing effort for a massive May Day protest.

The
New Dealer did have its share of victories to report. The paper
outlined $14 million in New Deal improvements to Seattle in 1938,
primarily in public works. New Deal Democrats also gained a large number
of seats in the House of Representatives in 1938. In addition, Democrats
were successful in getting out the vote to help overwhelmingly defeat an
initiative that would have crippled potential strikes. And the paper
relished in taunting its Republican "rival" publication, the Seattle
Times, at one point calling its editors "sore losers" for their
response to the New Deal Democratic presence in Olympia.[8]

.

In April
of 1939, Terry Pettus took over the editorship of the New Dealer.
Pettus became an integral figure in Washington State journalistic
history for his work in furthering social causes. He founded the Seattle
chapter of the American Newspaper Guild, which promptly staged the first
organized strike of a Hearst newspaper at the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer in 1936. The successful strike garnered national
attention and forced the newspaper to officially recognize the union.
Shortly thereafter, Pettus joined the WCF and turned the New Dealer
into an ideal platform for his progressive views. Pettus had associated
with the Communist Party for several years. In 1938, he officially
joined the Party and remained a member until 1958.[9]

Pettus'
concern for social justice is evident in most of his writings. He seems
to have changed the direction of the New Dealer from a strictly
political paper to a broader, more socially conscious paper, focusing
attention on the plights of persecuted people and the atrocities of
capitalist business. This may be partly due to the fact that the WCF was
well established in the Democratic Party by the late 1930s and felt less
need to motivate its readership to political action.

As Terry
Pettus assumed control of the New Dealer, America's attention
became fixed on the threat of war in Europe. In September of 1938, the
newspaper carried a report on a speech, given by New Deal Democratic
Senator Ralph Logan of Kentucky, warning that Hitler must be stopped or
else he would soon occupy Canada and Mexico and attack the US from the
north and south. In its November 19, 1938 issue, the New Dealer’s
headlines echoed Franklin Roosevelt's denunciation of Nazi Germany's
anti-Semitic atrocities. The editorial in the same issue demanded that
the nation cut off all commercial interaction with Germany because the
Nazis had proven to be unaffected by mere rhetoric. In March of 1939,
the paper carried a story about Hitler seizing Lithuania without regard
to that country's impending plebiscite.[10]

And in April it reported that the Nazi Party had already spent upwards
of $40 million on propaganda in the US over the previous four years.[11]
Clearly,the New Dealer recognized that the Nazi agenda
needed to be resisted at all costs.

However,
the paper was also somewhat handicapped in its anti-Nazi position
because of the strong Communist Party presence in the WCF and on the
New Dealer editorial board. The New Dealer was at least
partly tethered to the policies coming out of Moscow. While the Soviet
Union and Germany cooperated under a non-aggression pact signed in
August 1939, the paper was compelled to take an anti-war stance. While
continuing to denounce the evils of "Hitlerism," the paper lacked a
clear call to action.

The
slogan "The People's Anti-War Newspaper" was carried on the masthead of
each issue of the paper until July 17, 1941, shortly after Germany
shattered the non-aggression pact with the Soviets and marched into
Russia. The new logo became a bright, bold "V" for “Victory” over Nazi
Germany. In this same issue, the WPU came out in full support of
President Roosevelt's new policy of aid to Britain and the Soviet Union.

The
onset of World War II meant jobs were becoming available everywhere. The
New Dealer, while maintaining a patriotic front, was not about to
give military contractors free reign at the expense of workers’ welfare.
Pettus denounced the use of the Army to break a strike at the North
American Airplane Company by editorializing: “It comes as a shock to
millions of patriotic citizens that the first blood spilled by the army,
which is to spread the ‘four freedoms' to all parts of the world was
that of an American worker striking against a wage of less than $20 a
week.”[12]

Another headline blared: “Gestapo tactics used on US employees!”[13]
Meanwhile, a new advertisement aimed to net subscribers started
appearing weekly, declaring, “Every Week! - The Truth About the War in
Your New Dealer."

The
New Dealer changed tone yet again following the Japanese attack at
Pearl Harbor in December of 1941. Whereas previously the paper had
balanced support for the war with critiques of specific policies, after
Pearl Harborthe New Dealer poured all of its resources
into unequivocally supporting the war effort. The paper started a fund
to raise money for the war effort and carried a weekly graphic to track
the war’s progress and to encourage people to give more. Terry Pettus
even tried to enlist in the Armed Forces, but was informed that his work
with the New Dealer was too valuable to be neglected.

The
months following the United States’ entrance into the war saw an
increase in coverage devoted to one of the core causes championed by
Pettus and the WCF: racial equality. The paper was sensitive to the need
for equality in the booming workforce, confronting the government with
headlines claiming "Negroes and Jews denied war jobs".[14]

In the first issue following the Pearl Harbor attack, the paper ran a
story on American troops receiving care packages from sympathetic
Japanese Americans.[15]
Perhaps Pettus anticipated the swelling anti-Japanese sentiment in
America. However, the sense of wartime emergency ultimately caused
Pettus to support Japanese internment for the duration of the war, a
decision that was difficult to reconcile with to the New Dealer’s
longstanding support for racial justice.

The
paper also highlighted workers’ contributions to the war effort. The
New Dealer was convinced that the American work ethic would win the
war and proudly proclaimed “The beginning of the end for Hitler,
Mussolini, and Hirohito” when a memorandum from President Roosevelt to
Donald M. Nelson, Chairman of the War Production Board, was made public.
Roosevelt directed Nelson “to take every possible step to raise
production and to bring home to labor and management alike the supreme
importance of war production this crucial Spring.”[16]

In
between the political maneuvering of the WCF and the headline grabbing
events of World War II, the New Dealer still had plenty of column
space to devote to the people. The paper closely followed a variety of
local labor issues and didn't shy away from making public any injustices
that it learned of. In one issue, the paper carried a graphic photograph
of a beaten Atlanta International Ladies Garment Workers Union striker,
Joe Lee Walden, with the stark caption: "Still Happens."[17]

It also celebrated when Washington became one of the first states to
establish a minimum wage for women.[18]
And in 1939 the paper exposed a British-run cement monopoly and covered
the ensuing Grand Jury investigation while demanding that the plant's
workers and the state's citizens should reap the gains of a
publicly-owned cement industry.[19]

While
generally committed to serious social and political issues, the New
Dealer was not without a lighter side. "The Upper Crust" was a
weekly comic strip that featured caricatures of miserly old capitalists
and their portly wives. One such illustration depicted a wealthy woman
thumbing her nose at a crowd of workers gathered outside her balcony
with her butler standing attentively at her side. The caption below
read: "Shall I take over now, Madame?"[20]

Ruthe Kremen contributed weekly "Jingles" – poems romanticizing the
plight of the working man. There were also attempts to cover local
sporting events, such as the Seattle Rainiers of the old Pacific Coast
Baseball League, but these columns never ran for more than a few weeks
before disappearing. The paper even ventured into the risqué by
promoting the infamous Sally Rand and her "Dance of the Seven Veils" at
the Palomar Theater.

Advertisements for local businesses helped fund the paper. Toward the
early 1940s, this spread into product advertisements geared toward
working class males, including beer and fishing supplies. The paper also
took care to coordinate its advertising policy with its politics. At one
point in 1939, the New Dealer ran a series of notices reading:
"WANTED ... Names. A list of pro-New Deal businessmen who The New
Dealer can legitimately approach for advertising".[21]

Classified ads were also a regular feature, providing readers with a
marketplace for such things as automobiles and farm equipment.

The
Washington New Dealer chronicled a transformative period in local
and national history. It provided liberal reformers and the
working-class with news and information that directly impacted their
lives, and it contributed to the success of the New Deal, the labor
movement, the Communist Party, and the war effort in Washington State.
As the voice of the WCF and the WPU, the New Dealer proclaimed
the powerful message of putting the rights of working people first, a
message that is embedded in Washington’s past and still relevant in its
present.

The New Dealer praised Washington
State for being among a number of states to enact a minimum wage law for
women.

The New Dealer also publicized and
sponsored a variety of politically conscious social events, including
this folk-music hootenanny in March 1942.

Click to enlarge

The New Dealer was the weekly newspaper of the Washington
Commonwealth Federation, a left-wing caucus of the state Democratic
Party closely aligned with the Communist Party. This photo from February
of 1940 shows nearly 1,000 delegates gathered for the WCF’s annual
convention.

The WCF’s 1938 political platform
included planks calling for the expansion of social security, public
ownership of natural resources and public utilities, and protection of
civil rights.

The New Dealer, as its name
implied, was a staunch supporter of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal,
at least until events in Europe caused it to become more critical.

Conservative Democratic
governor Clarence Martin came under near-constant attack from New
Dealer editors.

In April of 1939, Terry Pettus succeeded
J.A. Cour as editor-in-chief of the Washington New Dealer.

Labor

An outspoken proponent of the labor
movement, the New Dealer published this photo of a bloodied ILGWU
organizer in its May 18, 1939 issue.

Racism

The New Dealer spoke out
against racism in the Northwest and around the nation. This front-page
story from October of 1938 highlights official foot-dragging during a
local police brutality investigation.

As this image from 1942
powerfully conveys, the New Dealer used Nazi racism abroad to
critique American racism at home.

As this front-page from July 11, 1940
shows, during the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact (August 1939 –June
1941), the New Dealer opposed the war in Europe and urged
President Roosevelt to “Get Off the War Path.”

This cartoon published during the
New Dealer’s anti-war period depicts “war” pulling “humanity” back
from civilization.

During its
anti-war period, the New Dealer argued that war was being used as
an excuse to cut wages and suppress the labor movement.

About Face

This issue, published just days
before Germany broke its non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union,
witnesses the New Dealer still highly critical of FDR and the
prospect of U.S. involvement in World War II.

By August 1941, the paper had turned
an about face and now urged the immediate opening of a Western Front and
“victory over Hitlerism.” Promoting the purchase of U.S. war
bonds became an important part of the New Dealer’s “V” campaign.

The New Dealer used this issue
to highlight the crucial contributions of American workers to the defeat
of the Axis.

By mid 1941, the paper was once again a staunch ally of FDR and a
patriotic supporter of American intervention in Europe. The paper campaigned vigorously
for New Deal Democrats in 1942.